


Mirror Doesn't Recognise

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Aliens, Ben Solo Lives, Doppelganger, Extra Treat, Horror Elements, M/M, Multi, Pining, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Trick or Treat: Trick, redshirt death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:54:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Things might have gone differently if Ben were awake when they hit the gravity mine. But he’s not.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 9
Kudos: 10
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	Mirror Doesn't Recognise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LamiaCalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LamiaCalls/gifts).



Things might have gone differently if Ben were awake when they hit the gravity mine. But he’s not.

The _Falcon_ is on its way to a scientific outpost in the Unknown Regions, a floating research station built around a hyperspace anomaly the First Order inherited from the Empire. The anomaly proved dangerous to work with, and after one too many research shuttles went missing, the site was abandoned. But the recently reinstated New Republic has taken an interest. Probably some captured First Order officer or other has been talking up its importance, hoping to trade the unique “intelligence” for clemency. Finn and Poe agreed to transport one of their delegates to investigate. They brought Ben with them in case his First Order experience came in handy – and, he suspects, though they’re too noble to admit it, in case the intel turns out to be a trap and they need a bodyshield. 

It’s what he’d do in their shoes. His quiet death in action, far out in the Unknowns where no political faction could be blamed, would be convenient for everyone.

Until that happy hour arrives, he’s been doing his best to stay out of the way. Mostly that means keeping to the cargo hold where he’s made himself a makeshift bunk out of old pallets. He’s down there napping away the boredom when a sudden, violent lurch sends the mission on a tailspin into chaos.

Not all of the crates in the hold are strapped down properly. It’s been decades since this ship hauled any actual freight, so the gear hasn’t been a high priority for maintenance: several of the anchor clips are rusted through, and they snap when the floor turns suddenly vertical. Waking with a start, Ben’s quick reflexes get him out of the way before the first crate shatters the pallet he was lying on. The second crate he blocks with the Force. But the third crate hits before he can do much more than throw his arms in front of his face. He feels a sickening crunch. His head slams back. The world goes dark.

He’s not sure how much time he loses, but when he opens his eyes to a swell of pain and nausea, the ship has stilled. Someone is moving in the cargo bay but looking at them makes the nausea worse. He trains his blurry vision on the reassuringly motionless ceiling.

Loose crates. Stupid. If any soldier under his command had ever forgotten to check something so basic, he’d have been tempted to refuse them treatment and leave them to suffer the natural consequences of their idiocy.

‘Good morning,’ a familiar voice says, and comes to a halt leaning over him. It’s Finn. Even in his woozy state, Ben’s heart skips a beat at how close he is. ‘Don’t try to move. You messed yourself up pretty bad, and the bacta’s not done working yet.’

‘What happened?’

‘We got yanked out of hyperspace,’ says Finn. ‘We’re around three-fifty klicks from the station, but it looks like the First Order left a few nasty surprises in our path. The engines are completely offline. A local ship has offered to tractor us in. Don’t worry,’ he adds, as Ben pulls his brows into a frown that makes his headache worse. ‘They’re friendly. They’ll take good care of us. How are you feeling?’

Like he just got crushed alive by several times his own weight in vac-sealed rations and spare parts. ‘I feel fine,’ he lies automatically. There’s something off about the way Finn’s talking to him. Something a little _too_ kind. Finn has no reason to pity Ben’s pain and several reasons to view it as karma in action. Maybe Ben’s still unconscious, and this whole encounter is wishful thinking from his injured brain. ‘How bad is it?’

‘Shattered clavicle, torn rotator cuff and a grade three concussion. Medic will want to run some brain scans when we reach the station, just to be safe, but until then the best thing you can do is rest.’

So, a sore shoulder and a headache. Nothing bacta and a few hours of shut-eye won’t cure. Nothing to explain why a man with so much cause to dislike Ben is suddenly hovering anxious at his bedside. ‘Who’s medic?’

‘I told you,’ Finn says, smiling. Ben’s dilated pupils create a kind of beatific glow around him. ‘Our new friends will take care of us. Here. Medic said I could top you up on painkillers once you woke.’

Sick as he is, Ben doesn’t have it in him to refuse the lozenge Finn feeds him. Gentle fingers brush his lips and then move up to stroke the hair out of his eyes. The visual blurring gets worse as the lozenge dissolves on his tongue, and the last thing he’s aware of is the dark smudge of Finn’s face against a golden backlight. Then the pain and the dirty old cargo hold are gone, and Ben drifts.

* * *

They’ve immobilised his injured shoulder in a plastoid brace. The sensation of sticky warmth tells him bacta is working underneath, and the taste of soluble bactaid lingers in his mouth. It’s taken the worst of the concussion with it on its way through his system. He’s not back at full fighting strength yet, but by the time the opiate haze dissipates, he’s improved enough that he can sit up without wishing he was dead.

Climbing one-handed up the cargo ladder is harder, but with a moderate amount of wincing and swearing, he manages that too.

Finn is in the main hold with someone who isn’t Poe or delegate Jord. Her face ignites a spark of recognition, but on second glance, that’s probably because the clothes she’s wearing are very, very obviously the uniform of a First Order fighter pilot. She’s skipped the plate armour and helmet, and torn the red sunburst patch from her shoulder, but the cut of that black jumpsuit is unmistakable.

Finn looks relaxed. He wouldn’t, surely, if she were a threat.

‘Welcome back to the land of the living.’ The woman smiles. ‘I’m Jen, field medic. I’d take credit for your quick recovery, but with the limited facilities on board, I wasn’t able to do much more than set the bones and drip bactaid down your throat. You have a strong constitution, Ben Solo.’

There’s something off about her smile. Ben can’t put his finger on it – can’t, in fact, lift his right arm more than a few inches. 

‘He’s had practice getting hit,’ Finn says dismissively. ‘Could always use some more, though.’ It’s the kind of jab Ben’s used to, so he’s not sure at first why it lands with a sting, until he remembers how kind to him Finn was earlier while he was out of action. Stupid. Finn’s not wrong: Ben has knocked his head plenty of times and lived to tell the tale. He doesn’t need Finn kissing his fucking boo-boo better, or medic cooing over what a brave boy he is. This is why it’s better that he stays in the cargo hold as much as possible. Getting too close to Finn or Poe always makes him forget he’s a grown man with a seven-digit body count and start wanting things he has no right to want.

‘He can practice once he’s fully recovered,’ Jen says smoothly. ‘We’re a little more than two full cycles out from the station traveling at sublight. Until he’s been through a proper medical facility, I recommend bed rest where possible and light duties only where absolutely necessary.’

It’s not just her smile – it’s her mouth. Her mouth moves strangely. Ben can’t explain where his creeping sense of wrongness comes from. Force-guided instinct is an art, not a science, and the picture his instincts are painting is so abstract he has to squint for recognisable shapes. ‘You’re First Order,’ he says, looking at Jen, then at the missing patch on her shoulder. ‘Or you were.’

Jen shakes her head. ‘My people settled on this station after the First Order abandoned it. We don’t believe in letting good resources go to waste.’

‘Where were you before that? There are no habitable planets in this sector.’

‘Not on your maps,’ says Jen. ‘They’re called the Unknown Regions for a reason. I belong to a field research team that’s interested in hyperspace anomalies. We go wherever we find them.’

‘Why are we stuck at sublight? Can’t your ship jump us closer to the station?’

‘Ben,’ Finn warns. ‘You’re not in command here.’

Jen holds up a hand. ‘It’s okay. You hit your head hard, and it’s normal to experience some disorientation after a trauma like that. Rest assured we have everything under control. I recommend you take a bunk and see if you can–’

Ben’s getting his eye in. The shapes are there amid the abstract brush strokes after all. There’s something off about Finn, too, something subtle, that the more overt wrongness of Jen and the pounding in his head almost made him overlook. It’s hard to pinpoint even now. Closing his eyes, he reaches for the Force. He centres himself and feels for Finn’s presence…

Nothing.

He opens his eyes again. Finn’s right in front of him, brow furrowed in concern, and Jen is starting forward as if to catch him from an imminent fall. Her energy is right there in the Force, unfamiliar, which is how it should be. There’s something where Finn is too, something just as real and alive, but equally unfamiliar, which is _not_ how it should be. Whatever Ben’s looking at, it’s not Finn.

It's not Finn.

That doesn’t make any sense.

‘Ben?’ says Finn. Says not-Finn. Every hair on his head is in exactly the right place, every line of his face matches perfectly with what Ben has spent so much time quietly pining over. A chill spreads through his veins. A practiced, sharp-edged calm takes over. He hasn’t felt this way since the war ended. He’ll pay for it later, no doubt, when the old habit triggers memories that trigger flashbacks that trigger another debilitating episode of grief, remorse, identity crisis. But that’s later. Later doesn’t exist when he’s under threat. It’s just here. Now. Whoever is right in front of him.

 _Whatever_ is right in front of him. The Finn thing may or not be a who.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. His concussion is camouflage – he lets his body sag a little, leans on the wall as though fighting another wave of vertigo. ‘Where are Poe and Jord?’

‘Poe’s in the engineering bay with one of my colleagues, assessing the damage to your systems,’ says Jen. ‘Jord was badly hurt in the accident, I’m afraid. We transferred him to our ship for triage. He’ll be safe there until we reach the station.’

Reading the flow of the Force confirms Poe is still aboard, unharmed, with another unfamiliar life form; Jord is nowhere. ‘The grav mine. Was it yours?’

‘No. It must have been left when the First Order vacated.’

A lie. First Order procedure was to clean up thoroughly after every foray, and this station was abandoned at least a year before the Tuanul massacre brought the war into the open. No commander would have risked exposing the extent of the First Order’s military mobilisation by leaving such an expensive weapon lying around.

Faking weakness doesn’t come naturally. But he needs time to think. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘For everything. I’m going to take your advice and rest now.’

Jen is a picture of earnest compassion. ‘Do you need more painkillers? You’re cleared for another dose if you–’

‘I’m fine.’ No – on second thought, the more compromised she thinks he is, the better. He arranges his face into his best approximation of a bashful grimace. ‘Actually, give me a lozenge for later? Just in case.’

She gives him a small handful, with a warning of no more than one an hour. ‘They’re potent,’ she says, ‘but short-lived.’ Ben tries to look like someone who plans to ingest them in the near future. He takes the main cabin, where in theory Finn and Poe sleep in separate bunks, except there are two body-shaped dips on one of the mattresses and zero on the other. Not exactly a revelation. Not relevant right now, either. His eyes linger on the evidence anyway, and part of him wants to curl up there. Fit himself into the space between the absent bodies and fall asleep on a bed less lonely than his pallet in the cargo hold.

He takes an unused bunk instead and lies there until Jen has stopped by, peeked in, and satisfied herself he’s passed out.

* * *

Space is huge. Modern technology being what it is, you never really have to think about it; you can jump from one planet to another in the same time it might take you to walk from your home to the corner store on foot. Safe inside a house-sized corvette or a neighbourhood-sized capital ship, you can watch through transparisteel as distances too vast for the human mind flash by too fast for the human eye. You get used to the taste of recycled air. You get used to rounding up distances to the nearest parsec. You take it all for granted, and the technological marvel of space travel fuses into the fabric of everyday life. 

Then your hyperdrive goes down, and suddenly you realise: space is huge. It has you alone. And it wants you dead. The hull that used to protect you becomes a prison, and anyone inside it holds your life in their hands.

Without the hum of its engine in the background, the _Falcon_ has the same too-quiet feeling as a mortuary as it drifts through space on the tractor beam current of their rescuers turned prison wardens. Ben considers transmitting an SOS, but even on the slender chance their enemies don’t intercept it, they’re so far outside broadcast range that he might as well lean out the airlock and shout for help. The odds of anyone receiving his message are the same either way. 

What he really needs to do is link up with Poe. The conventional route to the engineering bay would require him to use the main corridor, ruining his ruse of being asleep. All this sneaking around is not his area. Historically, he’s the guy who comes in with a crackling laser sword and a fleet of fightercraft ready to launch an airstrike on his command: effective, but hardly subtle. More recently, he’s the guy who avoids conflict entirely because he has no idea how to walk the line between sound tactics and war crimes.

But long before he became either of those people, Ben was a kid who thought the _Falcon_ was his personal playground. In the converted second bunk room – once upon a time, his mother’s walk-in wardrobe – a panel lifts free to reveal an empty space in the wall where the manufacturers skimped on insulation. Wriggling through the gap, with more difficulty and far more cursing than his six-year-old self, Ben reaches the engine well. It’s dark as a crypt and losing heat as the dead generator cools. Crouched in the narrow space, he inches forward until he hears a muffled voice: ‘Damn it, I think the transpacitor’s fried.’

‘What does that mean?’ asks a second voice Ben doesn’t know. The engineering bay is on the other side of this wall. Poe is there, all right. So is Jen's colleague.

‘In some ways it’s good news.’ Poe’s using his most confident voice, the one full of swagger and effortless charm that leaves Ben unsure if what he wants most is to kiss Poe or be him. ‘It means as long as we don’t touch anything, the engine will stay stable. No fuel leaks, no overflows – as soon as the transpacitor fails, all systems go into emergency shutdown. But if we try to reboot and it turns out there’s any juice left in the reactor…’ Poe’s plosive exhalation captures the rough sound of the ship’s engines going boom. Ben can imagine the hand gesture that goes with it.

‘So you can’t fix it?’

‘With friends aboard, I’d prefer not to try. This is more than just your basic percussive maintenance job. But I do want to get in and manually disconnect the generator, just to make sure nothing tries to reboot on its own.’

Screeching metal echoes in Ben’s ears as Poe pries open the compartment door, making his head throb so badly that for a moment he thinks he might black out again. But then it stops, light floods in, and he manages to get a finger up in a shushing motion just as Poe catches sight of him.

Poe’s eyes widen. ‘You wait back there,’ he calls to his unseen companion. ‘There’s hardly room to breathe in here.’ Then, squeezing into the maintenance passage between the generator and the wall, he hisses: ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Get that glowrod out of my face,’ Ben whispers back, head swimming. ‘You need to listen carefully, okay? I know this will sound insane, but Finn–’

‘They’ve done something to him. I know.’ Ben was expecting a longer argument. He assumed Poe would disbelieve him, and he’d have to fight the enemy while simultaneously trying to prove he wasn’t crazy. The relief of finding himself trusted without having to ask – of having an ally, when he thought he’d be alone – is dizzying. 

‘Who’s with you? Just one hostile?’

‘Yeah. One stormtrooper with a bigass gun. I didn’t expect to see you, though. When they said they were going to give you medical care, I assumed it was a euphemism.’ Poe looks awkward. Fidgets in the small space. ‘There was nothing I could do to stop them. They had Finn, and if I’d tried to intervene…’

Risking Finn to save Ben was out of the question, is what he doesn’t want to say. For what it’s worth, Ben agrees. ‘All they did was set my broken shoulder. I guess whatever reason they’ve captured us, they want our bodies whole.’ 

‘Could be taking us to a work camp. You people used to run your factories on slave labour, right? Maybe there’s one left out here that we missed when we were liberating your POWs.’

Poe doesn’t know they’re not dealing with the real First Order. ‘So you think Finn…’

‘Is under duress, for sure. They probably told him they’ll start shooting if he doesn’t act normal. Thing is, they have no idea what his normal looks like. I’m the guy who knows him best in the whole galaxy. I knew something was wrong the moment I laid eyes on him.’

More than wrong. Seems Ben has some explaining in his future after all. But as he opens his mouth to burst Poe’s bubble, the voice outside yells: ‘You okay down there?’

‘Sure am! Won’t be much longer.’ Poe drops his voice back to a whisper and tells Ben, ‘The engines are fine, they just stalled from the sudden drop to realspace. I’ve taken the hyperdrive offline myself. Their ship doesn’t seem to have one, and the slower the trip between here and the labour camp, the better chance we have of coming up with a plan.’

Another wave of relief. Smaller, this time. Knowing they can access hyperspace after all makes the situation less frightening in some ways. But Finn isn’t in hyperspace – he’s in enemy custody. Leaving without him is no more an option than risking his safety for Ben’s was.

‘We need more time to talk,’ Ben says. ‘Lose your new friend and find a way to come check on me in the bunk room. But–’ There are several reasons he’s been trying not to think too much about this. Finn was kind when Ben first got injured, too kind, the sort of generic kindness you’d expect any normal person to show an injured crewmate. Wrong, like Poe said. But then, next time they met, he was back to normal. The only explanation Ben can think of is that in the time he spent unconscious, whoever’s impersonating Finn gained access to his mind and learned how better to imitate his usual behaviour. Not hard to do with drugs and a torture droid. Which these people may well have, if they’ve been stealing from the First Order. 

Something inside Ben feels small and deflated at the growing certainty that, after all, it wasn’t really Finn who rushed to comfort him when he was hurt in the hold. He should have realised then and there that he was dealing with an impostor. At least the real Finn wasn’t present to witness his pathetic flight of fancy. Small mercies. ‘Anything he knows,’ Ben goes on, ‘we have to assume they know by now, too. Acting like a concerned friend will raise suspicion. He’ll have told them how you feel about me.’

For some reason, this makes Poe’s cheeks turn red. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Finn may have a blaster to his head, but he’s no coward. He hasn’t told them anything.’

‘You have to trust me.’ Ben infuses the words with as much persuasiveness as he can muster, hoping against hope that Poe will extend him the unearned privilege. ‘Finn may be acting strange, but you and I need to act completely normal or this whole thing’s going to blow up in our faces. Please. I promise I’ll explain when I can.’

‘You sure you don’t need a hand?’ calls the stranger outside.

‘I’m on my way up!’ Poe doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he gives Ben a curt nod. ‘Wait in your bunk and pretend to be unconscious or whatever. Guess I’ll tell our new friends I want to be alone with you so I can smother you with a pillow while you’re helpless.’

* * *

Whatever murder fantasies Poe uses to make his visit seem in character, he manages to get Ben alone about an hour after their last cramped rendezvous. Sitting on the opposite bunk, talking in hushed tones, he crests a new peak of Ben’s admiration by turning only slightly paler when he learns what’s really happened to Finn.

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

‘Every living person has an energy to them,’ Ben explains. ‘A kind of aura in the Force. You can’t fake it or miss it. No matter what it looks like, whatever’s walking around out there isn’t Finn.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I don’t know. Not human, I don’t think. I’m not sure Jen and the trooper are, either.’ Ben has had the last hour alone with nothing to do but think about it, skimming like an overworked clerk through every record stored in his mind about doppelgangers, holograms, bodysnatchers, illusionists. He has cross-checked every theory against the fact that their captors spent all that time mending his injuries, and the pessimistic part of him – which is to say, the largest part – fears the Finn-looking body, if not its soul, may in fact be as organically human as they come. That they’ve somehow simply taken Finn out and slotted their own consciousness in.

But he hasn’t felt Finn die. There’s no way he wouldn’t have noticed. Finn and Poe are … well, he thinks about them a lot. More than he should. They’re his role models now he’s renounced the First Order, proof that it’s possible – desirable, even – to live by love instead of fear and violence. The way they look at each other makes Ben feel things he’s too ashamed to name, even to himself. He’d take a blaster bolt for either of them, and not just because most days he’d take a blaster bolt for the simple relief of escaping himself. He’d feel it like a shank to the gut if one of them died. He’s not doubled over yet. That means however unlikely it seems on the surface, Finn’s still alive somewhere. Their captors may want their bodies intact, but not, Ben thinks, as meat puppets.

Probably.

Hopefully.

He’s had time to process all these possibilities. Poe hasn’t, and horror is starting to spread across his face. ‘Whatever they’ve done with the real Finn,’ Ben says quickly, ‘I don’t think they’ve killed him. My best guess is they’ve sent their doppelganger aboard our ship and taken Finn back to theirs to work him over for intel that can help maintain their cover. If we can believe a word Jen says, they took Jord as well. We need to get across that boarding ramp. As soon as we find them, you can re-enable the engines and jump us the hell out of here.’

‘This is my fault,’ says Poe, putting his face in his hands. ‘I was in the cockpit when the mine went off, and all I could think about was trying to get engines back online. Finn and Jord must have met the boarding party alone. If I’d gone back to help them–’

Bitter self-blame is written all over him. Ben feels a pang of empathy he has no idea how to act on except by sticking to the practicalities. ‘You’d be a prisoner too, and I’d be figuring out how to rescue all three of you alone. What’s done is done. We need to focus on taking out our captors and boarding the enemy ship.’ Finn would have said it more gently, with all his indomitable Resistance spirit. That’s probably why he’s one half of a loving pair while Ben’s a third wheel no one wants or needs. Trying his best, he adds: ‘What are you freaking out for? You’ve faced worse than this before. It’ll be fine.’

Poe takes a few deep breaths and reemerges from behind his hands. ‘You’re right. Guess I’m out of practice at fighting – I’ve gone all soft.’ He snorts. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you, but if there’s even the slightest chance of you being wrong about the person out there being Finn, I can’t risk hurting him. However we get to the boarding ramp, we do it clean. Okay?’

Clean, in Ben’s lexicon, has always meant no surviving witnesses. He’s fairly sure Poe means the opposite. Life’s giving him a chance to actively show he’s a different person now, instead of waiting passively and trying to look nonthreatening while his former enemies adjust to his presence. He wants that chance so badly. But it’s hard to feel grateful when it comes at Finn’s expense. ‘I have, uh…’ He rummages in his pocket for the lozenges. ‘Painkillers. One each will put everyone in a daze for the next hour or so. Maybe you can melt them into the tea? They taste a lot like sugar.’

He could be doing the wrong thing. Sparing lives sounds very noble and Resistance-like, but Ben’s years of experience tell him every enemy who survives is an enemy who might make him regret his mercy later. And he’s not sparing them out of compassion. He just wants Poe to like him for it – selfish motives. No different than the former self he’s trying to be better than, the one who'd have cut down everyone in his path and felt fine about it. Does he win back points by not keeping any of the painkillers for himself? He’s still in a decent amount of pain. If only there were a scoresheet he could work to: plus ten for sparing lives, minus five for prioritising personal desire, plus two for powering on through injury for the cause. He’d be eight in the black.

It’s never that simple.

‘I’ll get it done,’ Poe says, taking the lozenges. ‘Stay here, pretend to be stoned, and come running as soon as you hear the signal.’

‘What’s the signal?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ says Poe. ‘But I’ll start it with “hey, asshole!” so you know I’m talking to you.’

* * *

The ship on the other end of the boarding ramp is a First Order Cronau-class research shuttle. Ben has never actually set foot on one before. Light shields only for deflecting debris, no weapons except for two forward rock-cutting lasers, hyperdrive removed to make space for the heavy load of scientific equipment – these ships might as well have belonged to a different fleet than the one he fought in. It explains why they’re trundling through space at pedestrian speed and why their captors are so eager to avoid open conflict. Back when the station was operational, this shuttle’s job would have been to get ferried out by a better-specced warship and collect samples from around the anomaly.

His mind is at ease on one point: whatever other lies Jen may have told him, her story about not being real First Order is true. No one with the military connections to do better would choose _this_ as their primary vehicle.

Then again, the same could be said of his own weapons situation. He left his lightsaber behind when he took the mission, in a show of what was meant to be good faith but now feels more like disastrous short-sightedness. They’re carrying the best blaster rifles he was able to dig out of the _Falcon_ ’s lacklustre armory, with plated vests over their jackets and basic survival gear strapped to the chest rig: glowrods, field med kits, rebreathers. ‘I probably should have asked earlier,’ Poe says as he watches Ben maneuver through the docking hatch with more difficulty than usual thanks to his injured right shoulder. ‘Can you shoot left-handed?’

‘Of course I can shoot left-handed.’ Ben can shoot hands free when he really wants to, lifting his blaster with the Force and willing the trigger to squeeze on its own. It’s not much use in a firefight given how much time and concentration it takes. He learned the skill mostly to kill time on boring missions, and to one-up the Knights of Ren, who could never wield the Force with as much precision as he could. He wants to share the boast with Poe. He considers for a moment whether Poe will be impressed, or whether it’ll be just another reminder of Ben’s ugly past. Then he decides he’s wasted far too much time worrying what Poe thinks of him. He might as well indulge his desire to show off, since he can’t exactly force Poe to like him either way. He opens his mouth –

‘Shh,’ he finds himself saying instead.

‘I didn’t say anything!’

‘There’s something coming.’

When he was a kid, Ben used to love horror stories. The monsters and mayhem helped him make sense of the shadows in his head that nothing else in his pleasant Chandrilan surroundings could have cast. He’d sit rapt in front of the holoscreen watching mad droids and murderous aliens stalk increasingly terrified spacers down the hallways of their darkened ships. Most of his real life experience has been as chaser rather than chasee, and he never bothered doing it like they did in the movies. He’s not sure what to expect from the other side of the experience. He follows Poe to the wall, blaster raised, and creeps forward to peek around the corner.

He doesn’t see monsters. He doesn’t see anyone.

In a movie, this would be the it’s-behind-you moment. But getting behind an enemy on high alert is never as easy as they make it look on holoscreen. Resisting the urge to turn and check, feeling no threat at his back in the Force and knowing Poe has him covered, he steps out into the empty corridor –

– and steps back again, so fast he knocks his injured arm on the wall and has to bite his lip to keep from swearing. The thing in the corridor – and thing is the right word for it – is translucent. A quivering, amorphous mass of what looks like clear jelly, sliming along at a pace that tricked his eyes into thinking it was part of the scenery. 

At least it’s not behind them. But … it doesn’t appear to have a head, or any visible organs. Where’s he meant to shoot it? Which part does he need to cut off to win the fight?

Fuck.

‘What is it?’ Poe hisses, whisper-voice cracking with adrenaline.

Ben jerks his head: _see for yourself._ If the thing didn’t see him step out then he can surmise it’s facing away from their position. If it has a face.

‘That’s what took Finn,’ says Poe, when he ducks back into cover, face pale. ‘Oh my god. He must be terrified.’

‘We’ll get him out.’ Sounding confident is easy; sounding comforting is much harder, a skill he could have spent time on instead of the stupid no-hands blaster trick but somehow never did. ‘At least now we know what we’re dealing with.’

‘Do we?’

‘Well, we’ve confirmed it’s not human or humanoid. Or any species the New Republic has dealt with before. That means we can kill it without causing a diplomatic incident.’

Poe gives him a long, strange look. ‘You know, I sometimes have trouble deciding if I like you or not.’

Ben thought the answer was clear-cut. The uncertainty feels like an improvement.

* * *

He indulges in a brief fantasy that the slime thing’s lack of limbs will make it less of a threat to them. Maybe the enemies simply caught Finn off guard and took him captive before he could put up a struggle. Maybe they didn’t need to use force. Maybe this fight won’t be a fight at all, and they’ll make it back to the _Falcon_ without any blood (or translucent slime) spilt.

Ben talks tough to everyone – including, most of the time, himself – but the truth is, killing shakes him up. He doesn’t want to do it if he doesn’t have to. Doesn’t want to add to the body count that wakes him up most nights in an icy sweat. They don’t meet any more aliens after the first one passes them harmlessly by, and there are no signs of cameras or onboard security. As they track their instincts down corridor after empty corridor, he almost completely convinces himself they can make a clean job of it after all. Clean by Poe’s definition. Clean in a way that might make Finn and Poe smile at Ben later and say, ‘We’re glad you were there to help us.’

Then they find Jord’s corpse.

For a moment, Ben’s mind supplies a comforting delusion: it’s not really Jord. It’s a fake, like the one they used to imitate Finn. But where’s the strategic gain in pretending to be a dead body? The air reeks of death – raw human death, in its all too familiar and none too glorious reality. Ben doesn’t need to look any closer to know the truth.

He enters the lab anyway. Jord’s stiff, cold body lies uncovered on what looks like an autopsy table. The cause of death isn’t immediately obvious: no blood, no contusions. There’s a slick, clear film over his jaw and neck where some sort of fluid has bubbled from his mouth. Suffocation? The fluid looks a lot like the slime on that creature they saw in the corridor. Like the thing plugged itself inside Jord’s airways and oozed back out again once he stopped struggling.

‘He’s been dead a few hours,’ Ben says. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ He turns back and sees Poe hasn’t moved. ‘Finn’s okay – I can feel it. He’s on this ship. He’s alive.’

Poe nods, but he doesn’t look like he believes it. ‘If they’ve hurt him…’ The threat trails off.

‘They haven’t. They won’t.’ Still no answer. ‘We won’t let them.’

‘Right.’ Poe swallows. ‘Of course. We won’t let them. We’ll–’

Movement in the corner of the room.

Ben acts on instinct. Does what he needs to do, what he’s trained his whole adult life to do – what he’s best at, no matter how hard he tries to be someone else. The guilt and confusion can wait for later. He raises his blaster and fires once, twice, three times into the amorphous alien mass that has just lunged from its hiding place. The chill of Jord’s death is immediately replaced by the stinking heat of cauterised flesh as all three bolts find their target with unflinching accuracy.

The thing collapses. Quivering, leaking clear fluid.

Ben’s pulse has shot up so fast he feels dizzy.

‘Shit.’ Poe’s voice sounds like it comes from far away. ‘That’s the end of the covert phase. We’ll be lucky if they didn’t hear those shots from the station. Come on, we have to move.’

The temptation is to break into a run. But there’s more slime on the floor of the next corridor, hard to see until their feet start slipping, and the risk of running headlong into a fate like Jord’s makes them take each corner carefully. This whole section of deck seems to be devoted to lab space. They check room after room, but all they find are empty work bays and storage cupboards full of rock samples left over from the First Order’s research. The steady confidence Ben has always admired so much in Poe is fracturing under the weight of his anxiety for Finn. Ben can hear it in his laboured breathing, can feel it in the haze of dread that wafts like smog around their position. Words, no matter how practiced or unpracticed the tone of reassurance, can only do so much. Poe won’t be okay until he sees with his own eyes that Finn isn’t dead on a slab like Jord.

He’s expecting trouble any second now. Around the next corner, or the next one, an ambush could be waiting. Given the aliens’ tendency towards subterfuge, it probably shouldn’t surprise him that instead of coming to fight them in person, they choose a quieter approach. But it does surprise him. Because it happens with no warning, no alarm, no trigger: one second he and Poe are leapfrogging down a well-lit corridor, and the next second, they’re in pitch darkness listening to the cavernous rushing sound that haunts every spacer’s nightmares. Their enemies have depressurised the deck. They’re losing air.

‘Ben!’ he hears from a few feet behind, where Poe was covering his advance.

‘Don’t move,’ he calls back. A new sound has joined the rushing air, a squelching, oozing noise like someone very slimy coming at him around the corner. That cold, calm feeling descends again. Time turns treacly, and in the split second that follows, Ben finds he has plenty of it to get his rebreather in his mouth, switch on a glowrod and double-tap on the amorphous blob that emerges from the darkness in front of him. The thing collapses, but the squelching doesn’t stop. There are more of them.

Behind him. In front of him. All around.

He fires again.

‘Careful!’ Poe barks. ‘They’re trying to separate us. If you keep spraying bolts, you’re going to hit me.’

 _I won’t,_ Ben wants to say. _I’ll use the Force._ But the chaos is taking its toll: he can feel a jumble of life signs around him, but telling them apart is like trying to shoot only one snowflake in a flurry.

‘Just listen to my voice.’ Poe sounds less fearful now. Training kicking in, just like Ben’s. ‘Move along the wall towards me. They’re scared of us. They don't want to get too close. Keep your back to the wall and let them see your blaster’s up. I’m moving too. Here…’

Something warm and reassuringly non-slimy touches the hand of Ben’s stiff right arm. Poe. They thread their fingers together, squeezing, and the pain of engaging those muscles is worth the warmth and reassurance.

‘There’s a lab this way,’ says Poe. ‘Come on.’ Ben’s left arm aches from holding his weapon up, and the glowrod tucked under his right arm is impossible to angle properly. Flashes of light fall over the massing enemy as Ben and Poe maneuver their way down the corridor: the creatures move strangely, shying away from the glowtorch beam, timid and confused despite being the instigators of the ambush. They definitely don’t like Ben’s blaster much. The lack of discernible heads or torsos hasn’t made his fire any less effective. 

They reach the lab. Close the door. Be’s inner pessimist dreads finding another corpse lying on the table, but the room is empty. He slides down the wall, breathing hard.

Poe sinks with him. Doesn’t let go of his hand. For a pathetic moment, Ben is seized with the ill-timed urge to kiss him.

‘I counted at least two dozen out there,’ he says instead, forcing his mind back on task. ‘We have a readymade bottleneck when we open these doors back up, and I think we’re going to need it. If they rush us all at once–’

‘They don’t seem to want to,’ says Poe. He sounds puzzled. Talking slowly, tasting each word carefully on its way out. ‘They had every advantage out there, but they let us get away. Were they even carrying weapons? Why launch an ambush without a weapon?’

Right. Poe never examined Jord’s corpse like Ben did. ‘I don’t think they need weapons to kill,’ he says. ‘They prefer to fight up close. Jord had slime all over his face, spilling out of his airways. They choked him to death with it. My guess is they were expecting the depressurisation to knock us out so they could collect the bodies in peace. We caught them off guard by fighting back.’

‘You think they sent two dozen people to collect two bodies?’

‘They’re not exactly people,’ Ben huffs before he can help himself. The look Poe gives him is withering. Right: all sentient life has value. But now, while he’s fighting to protect the people he – 

It’s not a great time for an ethics refresher, is all. ‘Maybe we’re hard to carry,’ he offers instead. ‘It’s not like those _people_ have arms.’

His attempt at levity hangs in the air a moment before sinking sadly down to join them on the floor. Poe still has Ben’s hand, and he’s squeezing tighter, gripping with strange intensity. ‘Maybe we’re going about this all wrong. We’re two against who knows how many, and they’ve had plenty of chances to kill us. Why haven’t they?’

‘Because they want our bodies for their organ farm or labour camp or whatever the hell it is. Where’s this coming from?’

‘You said it yourself, we have a bottleneck. We’re going to get that door open and gun down wave after wave of living creatures who seem more scared of us than we are of them, without even trying to make contact or diffuse the situation. I don’t think I need to tell you this isn’t how the Resistance operates. I thought…’ Poe’s voice catches. ‘Finn and I both thought you were getting with the program. I really thought I was past the days of having to watch you slaughter crowds of unarmed people.’

It’s like a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment Ben feels winded, and he has to check that the rebeather is still in his mouth and he isn’t actually suffocating in the airless lab. ‘They took Finn,’ he reminds Poe, stunned that _he_ should have to be the one to bring that up. ‘They killed Jord, and any minute now they could do the same to Finn unless we stop them. How can you of all people be willing to gamble Finn’s life on principle?’

‘Love and principle go together, Ben. Without one, the other’s worthless.’ Poe drops Ben’s hand. His palm feels clammy and cold without the touch. ‘Did you know Finn and I are the ones who asked to bring you on this mission? You’re not exactly the New Republic’s favourite operative – hell, Jord nearly refused to board the ship when he heard Kylo Ren was on it. I looked him in the eye and told him no, that’s not Kylo Ren, it’s Ben Solo and we can trust him. I thought you’d changed enough that it was safe for us to let you in closer. We thought this would be our chance to get to know you better. But it turns out there’s nothing new to know: the moment you decide someone’s an enemy, it’s straight back to your old murderous ways.’

All the feelings Ben thought he’d have time to process post-mission come rushing out: shame, self-loathing, hopelessness. He can’t prove to Poe that he’s Ben Solo rather than Kylo Ren – they’re the same fucking person. If he had the choice he’d have every part of his old life surgically extracted, all the memories, the emotions, the violence. But there’d be nothing left to stitch back up. When he turned from the dark side that day on Kef Bir, his only hope for redemption was that maybe his skills could serve a new cause. If the cause doesn’t want his skills, then he’s worthless to it. He has nothing else to offer.

He’s willing to both kill and die for the people who’ve given him his second chance. But maybe those words, when it comes to him, have too much baggage.

He’s just blasted at least two aliens and he can’t see how he had any other choice. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asks, voice small.

Poe takes his hand again. Leans forward, brings them face to face, but Ben can’t look at him. ‘Stop fighting. Leave the blaster, raise your hands in surrender and go out there. Maybe there’s a way we can negotiate for Finn’s return. If we can just figure out what they want from us … Ben, look at me. Stop zoning out. What I need you to do is–’

But Ben has stopped listening. He’s looked up, as ordered, and the rest of the words have disappeared behind the rush of two simultaneous realisations that roar like blood in his ears.

One: he’s an idiot. Just stupid, really, really, stupid. The stupidest. Force powers are wasted on someone as stupid as him. If he’d died in this lab, he would have deserved it for being so fucking oblivious.

Two: there’s no rebreather in Poe’s mouth. He’s just sitting there. Right in front of Ben's eyes. Breathing vacuum.

Ben scrambles for his blaster. ‘Wait!’ the alien who has stolen Poe’s face says. ‘Don’t–’ The rest of the sentence ejects from his mouth in a spatter of blood that, moments later, dissolves into clear slime along with the rest of the thing’s body.

All Ben’s emotions get stuffed haphazardly back inside their built-for-purpose lockbox. Unpacking them later will be miserable work, but if he doesn’t move _right this second_ he’s not going to move at all. He’s going to cry his eyes out into a puddle of alien goo and moral quagmire while somewhere out there Finn and Poe die. He tests his arm, finds improved range of motion beneath the brace – the bacta has been doing its job. Good enough. He ditches the plastoid, switches the blaster to his right hand and grips the glowrod in his left.

Then he opens the lab door and kills every last enemy in range.

* * *

Cronau-class ships aren’t large in the grand scheme of things. Taken alone, in the airless dark, each corridor feels parsecs long.

Ben meets no more aliens after the bloodbath outside the lab. Rethinking their strategy, maybe. _Or too terrified to move,_ he adds in Poe’s voice, but pushes it back. They killed Jord, they took Finn, and now they have Poe as well. Ben doesn’t have the luxury of worrying about their feelings. He has an objective and he needs to get it done.

He clears one room, then another. Still no aliens, but there are more signs of life now as he moves forward. Equipment left out. Work stations scattered with personal effects. He’s getting close.

There are sounds up ahead. Voices.

Ben keeps his blaster raised, ignoring the throb of his not-quite-healed shoulder that isn’t enjoying its early return to duty. Stepping quietly on the slime-streaked floor, he follows the sound until it’s joined by the spill of light from the other side of a closed door. Two options: sneak around to find a less obvious ingress, or open the door and go charging straight in.

Option two wins. Ben has had enough subterfuge for one day. He’s always enjoyed a good dramatic entrance.

But when he finally has eyes on his target … he fucks up. He can’t account for how badly he fucks up. Because he knows their trick now. He’s braced for the sight of familiar faces. Inside he’s gripping the Force white-knuckled, calling on instinct to feel his way forward through the haze of illusion, and he _knows_ there’s only one real human life sign in front of him. The alien who’s taken Ben’s face is easy pickings. He shoots it, watches his own face explode as the bolt enters through one cheek and exits out the opposite temple – another item for the lockbox. But when he turns to do the same to Finn’s doppelganger, he falters. 

Maybe it’s the realism: this alien has thought through its cover story, weak and bruised as if emerging from recent enemy torture, a medical-grade oxygen nozzle sticking out of its mouth as it leans heavily on Poe. In a blink of his mind’s eye Ben sees the two of them joyfully reuniting, hears _you’re okay, I’ve got you_ and the sigh of relief from Poe when he finally confirmed (or thought he’d confirmed) Finn’s safety. Poe radiates protective love, gripping like he never wants to let go as his startled flinch at Ben’s first shot plays out in what feels like slow motion. Ben has to fire again. Has to rupture Poe’s bubble with another laser bolt of death. His finger falters on the trigger.

And that split second’s delay is all the enemy needs to make a mockery of his hesitation. One moment Poe is staring at Ben across the room, naked horror unfurling in his eyes. The next moment, the alien wearing Finn’s face has Poe locked in a vice grip, poised to snap his neck.

‘I don’t want to have to hurt him,’ it says. ‘So I hope you’ll do the right thing and put that weapon down.’

The world jerks back to normal speed. Ben’s acutely aware of how many seconds go to waste as he stands there, frozen, trying to process the consequences of his inexplicable failure to fire.

‘Ben,’ says Poe, voice suppressed to a wheeze in the alien’s grip. ‘Just find Finn. That’s all that matters. Leave me, find Finn and get him the hell out of here.’

He’s right. Leaving Poe is the strategically sound decision – and, by Ben’s rough on-the-fly calculation, the fair one. It’s Poe’s own fault he failed to recognise the doppelgangers for what they were, too swept up in the emotional charge of thinking he’d found Finn. He probably didn’t even spare a glance at Ben’s double to see that it, too, had forgotten its rebreather. A quick death like Jord’s may well be a mercy compared to whatever the enemy wants with them, whatever reason it’s been so keen on keeping their bodies intact. If he pulls the trigger right now, both Poe and the alien will die, and the rest of the enemies will have learned the hard way that blackmail doesn’t work on Ben. That will improve his chances of getting Finn back without anyone else trying to use him as a bargaining chip.

‘Drop your weapon,’ the alien barks, more urgently.

 _Love and principle go together._ That’s what the last imposter said to Ben when it was trying to talk him down. He has no idea if _love_ is the right word for what he feels towards Finn and Poe. Whatever it is, it’s intense, confusing, and as miserable as it is exhilarating. It’s unrequited and ultimately doomed. And if there’s a principle at stake here, Ben’s not sure which one it is. The math is simple: one life against two.

He knows what he has to do. Takes one last look into Poe’s purpling face, sees Poe’s absolute certainty, shining through the panic, that the two of them are on the same page.

He adjusts his aim. Readies his finger on the trigger.

Then, against every instruction sent from his brain, Ben’s hand drops the blaster.

He can’t do it.

He won’t do it.

He only has to look at the despair in Poe’s eyes for a moment before more aliens rush into the room and kick Ben’s legs out from under him. He feels the searing pain of weakened ligaments re-tearing as they wrench his arms behind his back and kneel on him, grinding his face into the slime-slick floor. Cold, heavy cuffs lock around his wrists, a weight he should probably have been wearing since the first day he turned himself over to the Resistance. All his promises of change and help and amends have come to nothing. He’s failed them.

Then a voice – Ben’s own voice, spoken from another throat. One of the aliens has stolen his face again. Through all the pain and crushing failure, he feels a sudden urge to laugh.

‘Thank you for your cooperation,’ the alien says. ‘Now we can talk. To begin: we owe you a very great apology for the death of your friend.’

* * *

It turns out there’s no organ farm. No labour camp. The aliens take Ben and Poe to the chamber where they’ve been holding Finn, sedated, hooked up to some sort of unfamiliar mind probe. ‘It’s painless,’ one of their captors tells them, still in Ben’s voice. ‘Not like the primitive torture devices our predecessors at the station used.’

The truth, as far as Ben’s overwrought mind can absorb, is this: the aliens came accidentally through the hyperspace anomaly from their own civilisation far outside known space. Their ship burned up on the journey, and none of the research shuttles they were able to steal from the First Order had hyperdrives. So they laid the gravity mine and waited. Their plan was to deposit Ben, Finn, Poe and Jord on the station – ‘abundantly stocked,’ they tell them, ‘with everything your species needs for survival’ – repair the _Falcon,_ and use it to jump back through the anomaly to their homeworld.

But the plan went wrong almost as soon as they launched it.

‘I recognised Jen,’ a confused and groggy Finn explains when on Poe’s insistence they bring him out of sedation. ‘I used to mop her lab on Starkiller Base. When they boarded us I thought we were dealing with a rogue First Order faction. We tried to fight them off, but Jord…’

‘A regrettable accident,’ says the Ben-looking alien. ‘We are a nonviolent people by preference and law, but one of our more inexperienced agents panicked in the heat of the encounter. Rest assured she’ll be disciplined when we join her on your ship.’

‘You don’t need to take our ship,’ says Poe. ‘Listen to us. We’re nonviolent too – well, we try to be.’ A sidelong glance at Ben. ‘Our government will gladly help if you let us contact them. They’ll bring you a ship of your own so you don’t have to steal.’

‘You cannot be trusted.’

‘We can. Let us prove it to you. As you’ve seen, our people won’t attack if it endangers any of us. We’ll stay with you as willing hostages to make sure they keep their promise.’

The deal proves tentatively acceptable, and becomes more so once the aliens have had time to collect their fallen comrades and confirm none of Ben’s hits were as fatal as they looked. Their medical tech is advanced, and the lack of heads or organs in the aliens’ non-shapeshifted form seems to make tissue regeneration simpler. They handle Ben more gently after that. Even heal his shoulder using a full-strength version of the field brace Jen applied on the _Falcon._

After that, there’s nothing to do but wait. They’re still more than a cycle away from the station with its long-range comms tower capable of getting a message to the Core. Ben, Finn and Poe find themselves deposited gently but firmly in what used to be an officer’s cabin. There’s a tiny kitchenette. A ‘fresher. A king sized bed, which in shuttle language means it’s big enough to sleep a whole human body with room to spare, rather than half of a body with various limbs sticking out the end or sides. Finn and Poe take that one. Ben sinks heavily onto the couch.

The fighting may be over, but his blood still runs hot and cold with excess adrenaline. Pulses of it spike through him like irregular heartbeats, each one jolting him from a tiredness so deep that even blinking feels like lifting weights. Ben’s all too familiar with post-battle crashes. Usually he gets to be alone for them. The stillness of the room is awful, but Finn and Poe’s presence is worse. They’re so relieved to be back together and all he wants is to be away from them, alone, so they can enjoy their reunion in peace while he has the meltdown he’s been needing to have since this ordeal started. 

He feels sticky with alien vital fluid – he took a sonic shower in medbay, and scrubbed his hands half-raw in the basin, but the feeling always takes longer to fade than the physical substance. His mind replays the day on loop. All the glaring clues that the issue could just as well have been solved with words as with weapons. All the missed opportunities to trust in the light side of the Force. To choose peace over aggression like he’s supposed to. One small fright, one knock to the head, and he was straight back to his old ways, just like the Poe impostor said.

And if the senseless violence wasn’t shame enough, he did it all in front of the two people he most longs to show he’s changed. Apparently there’s nothing to show. Ben flounders in self-loathing. He’s losing all situational awareness, alone with his worst self, reliving every shot fired, every plea from the enemy to stay calm and stop shooting. Poe’s face crumpling as he blasted the alien wearing it. His own face exploding in a spray of gore as his bolt passed clean through its jaw. That one’s cathartic. He replays it a few more times until he feels as nauseous as he did at the start of his concussion.

Something touches his shoulder. He twitches for his blaster – of _course_ he does, even now, even after everything – but it’s been confiscated, and all he gets is a voice saying, ‘Easy there. It’s just me.’

Poe.

Poe’s hand is on his shoulder, kneading where the injury has left his muscles tense and solid.

Ben stares.

‘Oh. Sorry.’ Looking uncomfortable, Poe stills his hand. ‘Thought it might help. I have old squadmates who used to freak out the same way after battles.’

‘I’m not freaking out,’ Ben says. And then, before he can stop himself: ‘It helps.’

The kneading resumes. Greedy for comfort he doesn’t deserve, Ben lets Poe’s silent understanding fill in the words he can’t say aloud. After a pause, Finn joins them on the other side, squeezing in next to Ben on the too-small couch. Ben’s not sure what about his situation moved them to want to offer comfort. But the glow of their physical closeness shines through the haze of guilt and horror until slowly, blinkingly, the rest of the world comes back into focus.

‘Never thought I’d say this, Ben, but I owe you a lot,’ Poe says at last. ‘The way you held it together today … if I’d been alone, I don’t know how I would have–’

Ben shakes his head sharply, cutting Poe off. If he has to sit here listening to platitudes, he’s going to lose control and lash out. Then he’ll have yet another eruption of violence to regret.

No words for a while. Ben’s keenly aware of Finn and Poe looking past him at each other, two halves of a united whole coordinating silently over how to pull him back from his cliff’s edge. This is why they’re better than him. Why he can never have what he wants – will never be able to earn it. When Finn and Poe see someone in pain, instead of shooting, they stop to help. No matter who it is. No matter how deserved the pain.

‘I heard the aliens talking about you two earlier,’ Finn says after a while. ‘They were tying themselves in knots trying to figure out how you both kept seeing through their disguises. Apparently they had a much easier time fooling the real Jen and her First Order crew.’

Poe snorts. ‘They don’t know as much about humans as they think they do. Fooling a disinterested colleague is one thing, but Jen didn’t know her people the way we know each other.’

‘I should damn well hope not.’

‘You called me sir,’ says Poe, lips twitching. ‘You came back from the airlock with these strangers in toe and no sign of Jord anywhere and barked “Sir, visitors,” like some kind of bootlicking Academy cadet. As if you’ve ever in your whole goddamn life addressed me with anything that could be mistaken for respect.’

‘You were way too nice to me,’ Ben adds. His voice comes out in wisps but he forces himself to talk anyway, because he can see the attempt at distraction for what it is and he hates, he _hates_ that he’s the only person losing it when all three of them have been through so much. He doesn’t want to expose this side of himself. Finn and Poe don’t need to know that sometimes, when these episodes sink their claws in, Ben can lose half a day staring miserably at the wall. He turns to Poe. ‘And you gave me this whole big talk about how hard you and Finn fought to get me on the mission with you. Apparently–’ he tries for a wry smile, facial muscles flexing disjointedly – ‘you just really wanted a chance to get to know me.’

He may not be in the best wisecracking form of his life, but the resounding thud with which his contribution falls flat is almost enough to send him retreating back into emotional blackout. ‘That’s … that’s what made you think we were fake?’ says Finn. For some reason he seems unhappy with the idea.

‘It was kind of a giveaway.’

Finn and Poe exchange a look, as though Ben isn’t right there in the middle of them. ‘How’s that for irony?’ Finn says at last. ‘The face-stealing alien versions of us are more honest than the real ones.’

‘Shut up, Finn,’ says Poe, in a voice he usually only uses on Ben.

‘What, you don’t think there’s a lesson in this? You two just spent a whole day shooting up aliens over a misunderstanding. If at any point someone had been smart enough to stop and say “oh, by the way, here’s what I actually want out of the situation…”’

‘That’s different.’

‘How so?’

‘The aliens knew what they wanted.’ Turning his eyes on Ben, Poe says: ‘You’re a difficult person to be around. I don’t think you can blame me if I’m not always wearing a smile when we talk.’

‘I’ve never blamed you,’ says Ben.

‘No, you’ve just gone all self-pitying about it. _Oh, Finn and Poe are being nice to me, that means they must be fake. Because the real Finn and Poe are so mean._ ’

‘That voice you’re pulling is kind of mean,’ Finn says fairly. ‘Ben doesn’t talk like that.’

Poe ignores this. ‘Do you have any idea how many conflicting feelings I’m dealing with? Seeing who you are now, remembering who you used to be. Some days I can’t think straight when you’re in the room because I’m sure you’re about to put a knife in my back. Other days I want to grab you by your stupid silky hair and kiss you. Everything I’ve ever known about you says you can’t be trusted. But today, when I saw your face in engineering and realised it wasn’t me against the world, I _knew_ somehow it was going to be you who saved the day. I just knew.’ 

‘Poe,’ says Finn. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Poe takes a deep, angry breath. ‘No, fuck it, he says he’s fine and not freaking out. Let’s take him at his word. Ben, I would have followed you off a cliff today if you said it was safe, because you had that fucking Jedi energy, like Rey always gets before she does something insanely cool. So whatever. I guess that means we’re friends now. But I don’t want to be your friend. I want to drag you to bed and kiss you all over and then never, ever speak to you again. I want you out of my system so Finn and I can go back to how we were before you somehow made us start caring about you.’

Ben’s body has gone strangely numb, as though all his synaptic impulses are needed for the single enormous task of keeping him upright. He’s too tired for this. It should be cathartic – it should be the stuff of his wildest dreams, with words like _kiss you all over_ and _caring about you._ There’s so much he could say back. So many words of longing and adoration he could let loose in a torrent of pure feeling, but his emotions never work the way they’re supposed to and now is no exception. Finn and Poe are so warm on either side of him, and he wants to tell them: let’s not do this now. Let’s just go to sleep, and make it someone else’s problem for a while, and in the morning you’ll both have remembered you hate me and I’ll have pulled myself together enough not to let on how much it hurts.

‘This wasn’t the plan,’ Finn tells Poe, voice taut with annoyance. ‘Guy’s neck deep in shellshock and you want to talk to him about your feelings? I’m calling the goddamn medic.’

‘Don’t.’ The absolute last thing Ben needs is a shapeshifting alien goo medic trying to turn his justified guilt into a mental health issue. ‘I’m tired. That’s all. It’s been a long day.’

Poe chuckles weakly. ‘Yeah, it has.’

The next thing that comes out of Ben’s mouth is possibly the most pathetic thing he’s ever said. Which, given the huge amount of competition, makes it pretty dire. ‘Just … let me pretend you mean it. Just for tonight. I don’t want to be left alone.’ As long as he’s not alone, he can keep the worst of the crash at bay and let sleep reset his brain.

For a moment, Poe looks like he’s about to argue. Then his expression softens. He and Finn exchange another look, and Poe sighs and says, ‘Sure. Pretend we’re pretending. Why not? You know, I once sheltered with a whole six-person squadron in a single crashed starfighter cockpit. I think we can make that bed work for only three of us. Come on.’

Ben lets them lead him to the bunk. Lies down with Poe on one side of him and Finn on the other, and they’re turned towards each other, arms draped over each other with him jammed like a wedge into the middle of their affection. He doesn’t belong there. Doesn’t really fit. But it feels so nice, so warm and safe between them, that it finally puts a stop to the adrenaline. He crashes so fast, it’s like he’s back in the hold with another painkiller lozenge dissolving on his tongue. For a few slow, deep breaths, Finn and Poe are all that exists around him. Then he sinks deeper and nothing exists at all.

* * *

He sleeps, and then wakes again.

Body heat. Even breathing. Vague memories of a dream that had something to do with slick skin, bare flesh, friction. Ben’s cock is erect, trapped against Poe’s thigh. Finn’s cock pokes into him from behind. Also erect. Their bodies are awake while their inhibitions are fast asleep. Shielded by darkness, moved by simple hindbrain instinct, they rub against each other in a tangle of sleepy limbs.

It’s so easy in the dark, quiet room for Ben to pretend he’s not really awake, not really in control of himself. Finn and Poe are reaching for each other across him. He hears the soft, wet sound of their lips locking, feels envy and arousal in a complex ratio he’s neither equipped nor motivated to try and weigh out. He has no idea how long he’s been asleep and whether what Finn and Poe are doing counts as passionate post-battle reunion or morning-after celebration. What matters is: he’s in the middle of it. What matters is: they don’t seem to mind.

What matters is: in voices rough with sleep, they’re murmuring his name. Murmuring, ‘Is this okay?’ and ‘You want us to?’, punctuating with a hand on his hip. On his stomach. Unclasping his belt. ‘Yeah,’ he murmurs back. ‘I want.’ He doesn’t have to name it. They understand.

It just happens.

It just happens, a breathless, impulsive distraction from everything they’ve been through. An age-old way to purge stress. They’re tired from fighting and groggy from sleep and all anyone wants is to feel good for a while. Reaching between them, pushing fabric roughly out of the way, Poe finds Ben’s cock with a dry, calloused hand that rasps and pulls and yet somehow feels good anyway. It feels better still when he spits on it and tries again. Wraps it wide around Ben’s cock and his own, rubs their erections together, while behind Ben Finn grinds against his ass and leans in to recapture Poe’s mouth in another kiss. Their desire is for each other but some of it lands on Ben on its way through, and Ben’s okay with that. More than okay. For a few gasping, rutting minutes, rational thought melts away and all he cares about is his cock.

He comes hard with his face buried in Poe’s chest, with Poe’s cock pulsing against his and Finn’s cock grinding haphazardly on his ass until all three of them are spent. So much of the day has been devoted to spattered body fluids that Ben can’t muster the will to care about this latest round, but through his post-orgasmic fog he feels the mattress dip as Poe gets up and returns from the ‘fresher with a damp cloth in his hand. With a deeply confusing amount of tenderness, he dabs Ben’s cock and stomach clean, then does the same for his sticky lower back, then for Finn. Finn plants a kiss on Ben’s forehead and says, ‘We should play pretend more often,’ but Ben’s too busy falling back asleep to ask what he means. 

* * *

The shuttle runs headlong into fierce solar winds, and the three of them end up locked inside the cabin for another two and a half cycles while the ship makes up lost time on its way back to the station. It’s not long enough for Ben to sort through his whole life’s worth of issues. But it’s long enough for him to more or less get his head around the fact that Finn and Poe aren’t lying about their feelings for him in some elaborate ploy to talk him down from a flashback. They've tried a few more times to tell him the violence wasn't his fault, and he's cut them off each time because he disagrees and doesn't know how to articulate why. But he likes hearing their grim jokes about what Chewie would have done to them if they'd lost the _Falcon._ Likes the thought that he achieved one good thing, at least, by saving the ship even if no lives were ever actually at stake.

There’s not much to do in the tiny cabin. The easiest method of passing the time is also one that helps drive the message home.

‘We never finished our conversation,’ Finn says at one point. They’re piled all together on the bunk after one weird but intense boredom-busting session during which Finn and Poe talked Ben through jerking himself off, watching intently the whole time and praising every aspect of his performance like no man alive had ever managed such a feat. (It’s a really tiny cabin and they’re really, really bored. The stuff they’re dreaming up is going to stay lodged deep inside Ben’s fantasy life for a long time to come.) ‘The first night, I mean. We kind of just … crashed.’

Ben shrugs. There’s a hard knot of shame and remorse inside him, and that won’t be going anywhere fast. But with Finn and Poe’s arms around him, he feels strangely unbothered. Let the guilt rear its head again when the New Republic rescue team arrives and they have to explain about Jord and the fight with the aliens and the _Falcon’s_ heavily depleted ammo stores. If Finn and Poe could witness what he did and still want to be with him like this then maybe it won’t be so hard to explain. Maybe it wasn’t completely wrong. Maybe …

Maybe it’s all temporary. Maybe their blissful new intimacy exists only in the isolated bubble of the shuttle, which will pop the moment they rejoin the real world.

He truly doesn’t know.

But for now, Ben gets to enjoy something he never dreamed he’d have. Whatever’s lurking in wait for him around the next metaphorical corner, he’ll handle it. Probably with more kneejerk violence than it deserves. Until then he needs to just work with what he’s got.

‘Well,’ Finn goes on, ‘I guess we don’t really _have_ to finish talking. We sort of already understand each other. Right?’

In answer, Ben picks up Finn’s hand resting on his stomach. He reaches for Poe’s as well. Joins all three of them together and squeezes. _Right._

They understand each other well enough for now.


End file.
